In the West, emissions contributing to global warming even dropped last year.

The United States pumped 3.7% less carbon dioxide into the air in 2012 than in the previous year; Europe 1.8% less.

Globally, greenhouse gases are being emitted at a slower rate this year than they were last year, and in both years the climb in emissions was less intense than in the past decade taken as a whole, said researchers at Britain's East Anglia University.

It's an improvement -- but a drop in the bucket by global emission standards.

Greenhouse gases are blowing into the atmosphere at rates 61% higher than they were in 1990, the baseline year for the Kyoto Protocol.

The international agreement is designed to decrease emissions contributing to global warming by holding its signees to reduction goals. The vast majority of the world's nations have signed on to it.

The United States is not one of them.

China is.

But the world's largest carbon emitter, which wrested the dubious title from the United States in recent years, pumped 5.9% more into the atmosphere in 2012 than in the previous year.

India contributed 7.7% more emissions in 2012.

Path to catastrophe

Not only must the increase stop, the researchers said, but industrialized nations must achieve a global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Time is running out to stop the world from reaching a dreading global warming threshold.

The world is on a course with current emission levels to reach a rise in global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius or more and end up in the worst climate change scenario issued by the U.N. panel on climate change.